The CU2.0 Podcast

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You may think IPA is a particular kind of craft beer but Joseariel Gomez, CEO of Shastic, is on the show today to tell all you don't know but need to know about Intelligent Process Automation. Along the way he also tells about RPA, robotic process automation.

What Shastic does is develop tools that let credit unions speed up many, many processes - everything from processing home mortgage loan applications through collections. Much that occurs in these functions is drudgery and, in many credit unions, the processes are very, very slow, manly because data is siloed and it had never been created for easy sharing across internal credit union functions.

What benefit does Shastic provide its credit union customers? Gomez did not hesitate in offering his one word answer: Speed.

Face it, we are in a now culture. Consumers want answers now, not tomorrow. Tomorrow often is too late. Members grow dissatisfied. Speed has become a crucial business tool.

Credit unions frankly often lag at speed. It's not a core skill.

Shastic's tools just may be the answer.

Shastic's tools also are a plus in today's environment where employees can be hard to find.  But what if cloud based automation can do a lot of that work?

The big surprise is how affordable Shastic's services are. 

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email [email protected]

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

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Cars are more expensive than ever.  New cars are hard to find in a marketplace ravaged by supply chain bottlenecks.  Consumers are keeping their cars for ever longer terms.

Add that up and one conclusion is that the new car financing marketplace is slowing.

But another conclusion is that there just may be an emerging market opportunity in car refinancing.

It's a relatively new finance play.  Many, many credit unions still aren't doing it.  In this show, Todd Anderson, VP of lending at LendingArts, tells about the benefits, for credit unions and their members alike, in offering car refinancing.

He also tells how LendingArts may help bring new members into a credit union via an auto refinance loan.

Anderson, himself a longtime credit union employee before joining LendingArts, understands how credit unions think - and he talks us through how and why car refinancing in fact is a great tool for credit unions, especially now.

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email [email protected]

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

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Who opens email anymore and as for phoning members, forget about it.

Diminishing returns from once mainline communication channels have many credit unions pulling  their hair out in frustration.

Enter Larky.  Larky delivers context appropriate push notifications from inside the credit union mobile app.  It's not SMS, these are notifications in the mobile banking app.

In fact Larky itself is invisible to the member.

What kinds of notifications are available? They are customized by and for the credit union. It might be info about auto loans if a member is inside a car dealership. Or it might be a 5% discount on Culver ice cream or burgers in Grand Rapids MI when a member uses an MSUFCU Visa card to make the purchase.

Tap rates, as you will hear in the show, are staggeringly high.

On the show to offer the details about Larky are CEO Gregg Hammerman and Ami Iceman Haueter, Chief Research and Digital Experience Officer at MSU Federal Credit Union.

Incidentally, Larky is another company where Tom Shen is a board member.  If you haven't heard his podcast there's a link in the show notes.

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email [email protected]

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

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 This is a different kind of podcast. Unlike just about any other in the series.

It started normally enough.  An email came in from a PR person offering Kent Lugrand, CEO of the $1 billion InTouch Credit Union in Texas, as a guest to discuss the institution's high yield checking account which provides members a way to earn up to 4% interest on deposits if they put $2500 per month on their debit card.

Then I discovered that InTouch has made a $1 million pledge to fund food banks for the hungry and needy in DFW, Las Vegas, and Detroit, its three chief regions.  Money to fund this comes from a share of revenues generated by credit and debit card usage and also new loans.

The combination of food for the hungry and more interest for members seemed interesting and relevant enough to warrant inviting Lugrand to guest.

But we get a whole lot more than that. For instance: Lugrand started his career as a stockbroker and for some years he made the very big bucks. He had everything he wanted to buy and that was a lot of stuff because he had grown up one of nine children in a Plains state family where money was in short supply.

He still remembers when he got his first winter coat that was brand new. He tells that story in the podcast.

Did I mention that Lugrand is African American? I did not and that is because he is a man who is proud of who he is but he also is proud that he's a good family member, proud that he cares for his community, proud that he is a hard and smart worker.

 He talks about him and race in the podcast too.

And why he ditched the high flying life of a stockbroker for credit unions.

Along the way we do talk about High Yield Checking.

But buckle up. This is not the ride you expect - but you definitely won't want your money back.  This is a podcast you will tell many others to listen to.

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email [email protected]

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

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The latest CUES executive compensation numbers for credit union executives are out and this explosion still reverberates across the industry. Total median executive comp in 2022 was up 14.9%.  

For CEOs the total median compensation was $515,602.  

Understand: those numbers are from a time when inflation was not a concern and most workers in most industries were happy to get a 2 or 3% pay hike.

Now every worker wants a big pay hike to stay even with inflation. You can bet credit union c-suiters will too.

How did this happen in the credit union c-suite? And what does it mean for credit union exec comp committees on the board and indeed for all other executives in a credit union?

On today's show to explain what's going on and to offer predictions about what this means for your pay packet is Kirk Kordeleski, onetime CEO at Bethpage Federal Credit Union, one of the nation's biggest, and now an executive at OM Financial Group, which specializes in SERPs which are building block retirement plans for key credit union executives.

Kordeleski's firm prediction is that you ain't seen nothing yet. Credit union c suite compensation had long been a sleepy topic but now there is a war for top talent - the talent needed to compete in today's fierce financial services world - and top talent demands and deserves top money.  

The credit unions that are in this to win are opening their coffers to hire the leaders they need.

Are you?

Want Kordeleski's one word summary of today's credit union compensation landscape? "Dynamic."  

Who thought anyone would ever say that?

Hear it on today's show.

Want to know more about SERPs - or other matters raised in this podcast? Email Kordeleski [email protected]

This show is in a Money Talks series where credit union compensation is untangled.  This show will help some executives negotiate better pay packages and will also help some board members understand the ways in which 2022 credit union compensation is utterly different from 1992 comp plans, even 2012 plans because now competition for talent is so much fiercer.

Hear episode one in Money Talks here.  Episode 2 is here. 

Have suggestions for topics to explore in this show? Email me, Robert McGarvey - [email protected]

This episode was recorded at a conference. There is some background noise.  Tune it out, just as you would if you were holding a conversation at that conference.

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What a difference a year makes.

A year ago the typical credit union was awash in deposits - much of it coming in via stimulus money - and accordingly there was a rush to get that money back out on the streets working. that meant loans.

In mid 2022, the deposit glut is history for most credit unions.

So what happening on the lending side?

Meet Chad Heese, chief lending officer at $3.7 billion Rogue Credit Union in Oregon.  He spends his days pondering how to profitably put Rogue's cash on hand to work and in this podcast he shares a range of ideas, some quite unconventional.

Heese also recounts how he got started on his career in financial services and he traces it back to a time when he called an HR person at a bank twice weekly for months before he even got an interview.

But when he did get that interview he got the job and now he has almost 20 years of service at credit unions along with a few starter years at banks.  His is an intriguing job history and that's where we start the show.

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email [email protected]

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

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Robert Johnston was a Marine and that is where he honed his skills at waging war in the cyber dimension - and you better believe that is where a lot of warfare now happens, from Russia knocking out ATMs in neighboring countries through nation state hackers targeting financial institutions, both to fuel widespread anxiety and simply to plunder others' money.

Johnston has a pedigree at this. He led the investigation into the Russian Intelligence Service breach of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 and before that he worked on the hack of the Joint Chiefs of Staff email in 2015. That is cyber war at its highest levels.

Nowadays Johnston and Adlumin, the company he co-founded and where he serves as CEO, is an active player in helping credit unions in particular bolster their cyber security and that means dealing with everything from Denial of Service Attacks (DDos) through Ransomware, which is today's flavor of the moment. Along the way Johnston also works with helping credit unions stay compliant with cybersecurity requirements set out by the regulator and they are voluminous.

It's a fast changing field and in this podcast Johnston gives a glimpse into its challenges and its excitement.

Think of this podcast's subtitle as Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Cybersecurity But Were Afraid to Ask.

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email [email protected]

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

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  Quick now, are you current on what's happening in the fast changing payments universe? Can you ace a pop quiz on the hot topics in payments such as

*         Contactless payments’ role in a post-pandemic economy (Tap to Pay, Digital Wallets, etc.)

·         Faster payments and key considerations for the FedNow service

·         Emerging payments fraud concerns

·         QR codes and alternative payment rails

·         Credit card trends and the travel spending resurgence

Do you have a half hour? If you do listen up to Jason Bohrer of the US Payments Forum who gives us a quick update of the need to know headlines in today’s payments news.

Listen up

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Tom Shen is a fintech OG, one of the originals who got his start in the industry 40 years ago when it was still called just financial services.

He's had glittering successes.  He was EVP at Digital Insight when Intuit bought it for $1.33 billion in 2007. Earlier he founded Software Dynamics Inc. (SDI). More recently he founded mobile app developer Malauzai which was bought in 2018 by Finastra.

Now he is an active investor and a board member of five companies, including Sensibill and ZSuite, both of which have been featured on this podcast.

In this show Shen revisits his earlier days in fintech but - crucially - he spells out in detail what a fintech needs to know to work successfully with credit unions and also what a credit union executive needs to know to work successfully with fintechs.

His advice is sound, it's levelheaded and, importantly, it's rooted both in what worked in the past and what he sees working today.

Listen and you will hear pointed advice that says credit union execs today want fintech that delivers measurable and quick benefits. Talk about an 18 month build out and, guess what, that is an audience lost.

Know too that Shen was a guy who was working with credit unions literally decades before many fintech execs saw this as a good market. He tells what attracted him - and these are strengths that credit unions still have.

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email [email protected]

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

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Ask Pablo DeFilippi, an executive with Inclusiv, the trade group for CDFI credit unions, why they did a deal with QCash, the fintech birthed to facilitate making small dollar loans quickly to credit union members, without reference to credit scores, and his answer boils down to this: It's the CDFI mission.

Members have financial needs, many turn to very high interest alternatives such as payday loans. For many of them QCash is the better option.

QCash also is automated and the process happens online. It's also fast. Decisions are made within 60 seconds.

A member has a life event - a blown car water pump, maybe it's an urgent need for dental work, or perhaps it's that eviction if the landlord doesn't get a chunk of cash. When before a credit union might have had to turn that member away, now QCash gives the member an option.

It's perfect with Inclusiv.

You may remember you heard DeFilippi on this show before. You are right. Here is his 2020 episode.

And here's a link to a 2022 show with Seth Brickman, CEO of QCash.  

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email [email protected]

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It's a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto